- CR
Corpus reformatorum: Philippi Melanthonis Opera quae supersunt omnia, ed. C. G. Bretschneider and H. E. Bindweil, Halle–Braunschweig 1834–60
- LW
Luther's works, St Louis–Philadelphia 1958–86
- WA
Dr. Martin Luthers Werke, Weimar 1883–1993
The publication of the ‘Ninety-five Theses on Indulgences’ in late 1517 ignited a firestorm of rebuke and criticism of their author, Martin Luther, that made it necessary for his monastic superiors to intervene. At the meeting of the Augustinians in Heidelberg the following April Luther chose not to discuss the issue of indulgences but instead to go to the heart of what he was doing as professor and proponent of reform. He presented his method for practising theology with reference to what he regarded as the key issues of the failure of pastoral care and proper proclamation of the biblical message in the Church of his time. In twenty-eight ‘theological’ and twelve ‘philosophical’ theses he set forth principles that he believed should guide theologians as they exercised their office as expositors of God's word. His principles arose out of the experience of human suffering, but not primarily physical pain or mere mental anguish. Luther wrote out of the spiritual struggles that had driven him to despair as he searched for his own identity through works that he used to please God.
As Jos Vercruysse has shown,Footnote 1 the first eighteen theses of this ‘Heidelberg Disputation’ treat the anthropologically grounded issues of good works and free choice. The five that follow, on ‘true wisdom’, express what twentieth-century scholars have labelled Luther's ‘theologia crucis’. Walther von Löwenich made this expression a code word for a significant element of the Wittenberg reformer's hermeneutic. Others have fashioned variations on that definition.Footnote 2 Some have even suggested that the ‘theology of the cross’ disappears from Luther's thinking soon after 1518. It did disappear from the Melanchthonian dogmatic tradition of summarising Luther's thought.Footnote 3 It is true that that phrase does not occur often in the reformer's writings, but an examination of his lectures on the Psalms of ascent delivered in 1532 and 1533, which include a use of the phrase ‘theology of the cross’, reveal that the core of his ideas brought together in 1518 under this label remained vital to the structure of his thinking.
Thesis 20 of the Heidelberg theses stated that the person who deserves to be called a theologian is one to whom ‘suffering and the cross’ make clear the visible and manifest things of God,Footnote 4 that is, his interaction with humankind and his delivery of salvation through his Word in its various forms. These principles do not constitute a ‘theology of suffering’. The next thesis makes it clear that a ‘theologian of the cross’ is one who ‘calls the thing what it actually is’.Footnote 5 By ‘calling a thing what it is’ Luther meant the sober, realistic assessment of sin and evil, especially of the continuance of sin and evil in the lives of the baptised, without recourse to rational explanation in every case. ‘Calling a thing what it is’ also produced the recognition and trusting acceptance of what God has revealed about his rescue of human creatures from their sinfulness through Christ's cross. Behind this conviction lay Luther's ‘ontology of the Word of God’ which posited that the Creator establishes reality through his creative Word. Key to God's speaking in the midst of the fallen world, Luther made clear, was the ‘Word made flesh’, the incarnation of the second person of the Trinity in the human person of Jesus of Nazareth, and the liberating Word of absolution which Christ's death and resurrection had created. The suffering of pious Christians forces them to live with the tension between their understanding of God's promises and the reality of the evil with which they struggle. Luther intended that his ‘theology of the cross’ should help them trust in the reality of God's Word against what seems real to them and to cling to the God who reached out to them from the cross.
Against this background Luther's use of the phrase and development of the idea of a ‘theology of the cross’ took shape on the basis of 1 Corinthians i.18–ii.16.Footnote 6 There Paul described the message that God conveyed when he solved the ultimate problem of humankind, its revolt against him and its rejection of his lordship, by entering human flesh to die on the cross and rise from the dead. This ‘impotent’ and ‘foolish’ message, Paul taught, has made Jesus the crucified one the ‘source of life’, the ‘wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption’ of the people of God (1 Cor. i.25, 30). From this and other biblical passages Luther developed an understanding of how God deals with fallen sinners and transforms them into his children. The ‘theology of the cross’, as Luther conceived it in 1518, recognised God as the almighty Creator of all that is and prescribed an attitude of dependence on God's revelation of himself rather than a search for ‘the hidden God’. It presumed that this dependence or trust in God – faith – constitutes the centre and direction of the human creature. In addition, it acknowledged God's peculiar way of working in the world through means that appear insignificant and even evil: both Christ's cross and the crosses of daily life, which seem to be the opposite of what believers know to be God's disposition toward them. That the life of faith in Christ does in fact experience suffering is the result both of sin and of Satan's conflict with God, the clash of God's truth with the deceiver's murderous lies. Such suffering leads sinners to a continuing reappraisal of their own lives; it can help produce daily repentance.
This appraisal of God and the course of human life did not emerge in Luther's thought as a totally new discovery in 1518. Two years earlier, lecturing on Romans ix.3, he sketched the tension within God's way of working in a sinful world. He commented that Christian love means ‘to hate oneself, to condemn oneself, and to wish the worst, in accordance with the statement of Christ, “He who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life”’ (John xii.25). Luther continued ‘what is good for us is hidden, and that so deeply that it is hidden under its opposite. Thus, our life is hidden under death, love for ourselves under hate for ourselves, glory under ignominy, salvation under damnation, our kingship under exile, heaven under hell, wisdom under foolishness, righteousness under sin, power under weakness’.Footnote 7
Luther was still developing the framework for such thinking at that time. This was grounded upon reliance on God's Word, with the corollary willingness to live without tidy explanation for all the problems that evil imposes on believers. The Heidelberg disputation, as a guide to the practice of theology, set forth a fresh approach to questions regarding God's way of revealing himself and of God's action to reconcile sinners to him. Luther presented his Augustinian brothers with a new definition of what the human creature is and what God's relationship to his human creatures is. For, as Vercruysse has shown, the section of the Heidelberg disputation that sketches the theologia crucis is intimately connected to its other sections, which treat the human creature's relationship to the creator through good works and the freedom of the will and God's address of his human creatures in both law and Gospel. In this disputation Luther was withdrawing God and his truth from dominance of human reason and placing rational faculties under the word of God, in accord with his training in the theological school created by Gabriel Biel.Footnote 8 In this disputation Luther was withdrawing human performance from the individual's relationship with God and placing obedience to his commands firmly and exclusively in the relationship with other creatures. The theology of the cross also casts those plagued with the flaws and faults of their lives, particularly of the inadequacies of their attempts at truly pious living, onto God's grace and Christ's cross. Luther thereby intended to undercut glorying in human achievements and human explanations that could not solve the problem of evil. His own questions regarding the justice of God – theodicy – broke the control of reason in his life. His appraisal of human sinfulness undercut all attempts to glory in human works that always fell short of what his perfect God demanded and wanted from creatures that he had made for a life of total trust which produced perfect obedience.
The theologia crucis therefore reminds theologians that God is Lord and that his human creatures cannot master every problem through their own attempts to account for the course of human life, especially for the evils people encounter. They cannot master every problem through their own piety and obedience since, in the mystery of sin, human performance tends to place the focus on the pious believer rather than on God or the neighbour. Living by faith includes acknowledging God's lordship and love even when neither appear to be functioning in daily living. The theologia crucis also recognises evil as evil and does not try to seek control over life through deluded assertions that what happens contrary to God's will is, underneath appearances, somehow good. This way of thinking recognises that God's lordship can put evil to use for his own purposes even though it does not always do so. At the same time the resurrection of Christ assures believers that God will finally banish all evil from the lives of his chosen children. This theological hermeneutic acknowledges that the struggle against evil, which God has already decisively won through the death and resurrection of Christ, goes on for some unexplainable reason, as Satan conducts his rear-guard campaign on the battlefields that he creates in the lives of God's people. Luther designed his theologia crucis first of all to aid believers in coping with the mystery of the continuation of sin and evil in the lives of the baptised, acknowledging its reality of every form of evil while at the same time defying it with every means at hand.Footnote 9
Although the ‘theology of the cross’ has loomed large in theological discussions in the twentieth century, it never became, in the form presented in Heidelberg, a formal dogmatic topic in Lutheran theology and lost its significance as a hermeneutical or methodological guide to practising theology in the Wittenberg manner. Some scholars have questioned whether, even in Luther's own theology, the concept of the theology of the cross continued to play a role. To be sure, ‘theologus crucis’ and ‘theologia crucis’ were not isolated expressions. Within a year of his Heidelberg engagement, the reformer commented, ‘The cross of Christ is the only instruction in the Word of God there is, the purest theology.’Footnote 10 That he understood this maxim as a hermeneutical principle is clear from his earlier remarks on Psalm v.12: ‘The cross puts everything to the test;’Footnote 11 ‘Truly the cross itself alone is the judge and witness of the truth.’Footnote 12 In treating Psalm v he used the phrase, ‘the cross alone is our theology’ to affirm his rejection of the contribution of the free will to attaining hope and to reiterate that ‘the sufferings of the cross, death, and hell’ instead create true hope in God.Footnote 13 The critical question, however, remains whether the fundamental orientation to practising theology of the theologia crucis remained effective in Luther's thought.
Fifteen years after Heidelberg, on 15 July 1533, again during lectures on the Psalms, this time Psalm cxxvi.5, Luther again identified the theology of the cross as ‘our theology’.Footnote 14 At first glance it appears that Luther was moving toward a restricted use of the phrase at that point, for it here alluded simply to human suffering, specifically the suffering of Christians. As he explained Psalm cxxvi.5, ‘those who sow in tears will reap with shouts of joy’, he referred his students to Paul's words: ‘through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God’ (Acts xiv.22). Luther continued, according to Georg Rörer's notes, ‘You know this teaching very well since our theology is a theology of the cross. It is necessary for Christians to suffer, etc., and after that the glory in Christ [1 Peter i.11]. There is no other way. For no walk of life is experienced apart from the cross.’Footnote 15 Does this definition of his theologia crucis as focused on human suffering mean that the hermeneutic of trust in God's revelation of himself and the life of faith it creates had disappeared from Luther's way of practising theology by 1533?
In fact, when Luther's amanuensis Veit Dietrich prepared these notes for publication in 1540, his edition altered the key phrase, rendering the sentence: ‘For theology is properly called the profession of the holy cross.’Footnote 16 ‘Professio’ can refer to the Christian's walk of life or the confession of the faith. If the phrase here referred to the latter, it faithfully reflected one central focus of the Heidelberg Disputation: God's revelation of his will through his Word. 1 Cor. i and ii speak of the ‘word of the cross’ that is proclaimed rather than simply the events of Christ's crucifixion as a historical occurrence. Luther believed that the action of God in the crucifixion and the resurrection of Jesus could not be separated from the delivery of the benefits of Christ in his own day through the use of the Word in proclamation and in the sacraments.
When Luther began what would be a lecture course of almost exactly one year on the Psalms of ascent, Psalms cxx-cxxxiv,Footnote 17 on 5 November 1532, he was living in quite a different situation than had faced him in 1518. In 1518 ‘the theology of the cross’ reflected Luther's struggle to explain his call for the reform of the practice of theology at the university. He was concerned with the hermeneutical principles that had brought him to criticise not only significant elements of the content of scholastic theology but also its very method of interpreting God's Word and the tradition of the Church. In 1533 his context included more personal feelings of threat and suffering. Even though the immediate threat of military action against the Lutherans from Emperor Charles v had faded somewhat, Duke George of Saxony persisted in challenging Wittenberg reform, among other ways by persecuting its adherents in the town of Oschatz.Footnote 18 The papacy seemed to be moving toward more open and active confrontation with Wittenberg reform.Footnote 19 Luther's Evangelical foes had not ceased to plague him,Footnote 20 and his own followers in Nuremberg were in the midst of a dispute over confession and absolution.Footnote 21 Furthermore, as he gave his lecture on Psalm cxxvi, he was recovering from a bout of illness that had extended over several months.Footnote 22 Tribulations of various kinds plagued Luther throughout his career, and these days were no different. His practice of theology in the manner of the cross, in via Wittenbergensi, had established itself and needed no special reinforcement, no fresh formulation or definition.
None the less, although Luther narrowed the focus of the term theologia crucis to the suffering of believers in the particular citation treated here, throughout his lectures on the Psalms of ascent there are examples of his observing the hermeneutical guidelines for practicing theology set forth in the Heidelberg disputation. These lectures demonstrate that in 1532/1533 Luther's approach to biblical texts still followed the principles of (1) distinguishing the hidden God, who lies beyond the grasp of human comprehension, from the revealed God, who has disclosed his essence by giving himself for the sins of the world in Christ's sacrifice on the cross; (2) relying on faith in God's Word over human reason; (3) perceiving how God acts in human lives by hiding himself under what seems to be contrary to his will and his love (as close to theodicy as Luther comes); and (4) encouraging the saints in the midst of their battle against Satan and every form of evil he uses as they live the life of daily dying and rising in repentance. Luther's theologic followed this course: Christ died for sinners, to take away their sin; sinners must die to their sin by renouncing all false gods with which they try to construct life for themselves. They must put sinful actions and sinful desires to death. This mortification of the sinful way of life leads to a resurrection as a new creature of God, according to the Wittenberg reformer's replication of Paul's view of the Christian life (for example in Romans vi.3–11 and Colossians ii–iv). A comparison of Luther's comments in these lectures with the Glossa ordinaria and with Augustine's comments on the Psalms reveals that when Luther injected his theology of the cross into his interpretation, he was not dependent on these medieval antecedents.Footnote 23 Whether other previous commentators gave him the basis for some of his insights remains unclear, but it seems likely that his exposition of these texts from the perspective of his own theologia crucis was the product of his own reflection and deliberation on the text. In 1515 Luther had ended his lectures on the Psalms with Psalm cxxvi and had treated only Psalms cxx, cxxii and cxxvi among the Psalms of ascent. At no point in those lectures did he make observations that pointed to the theology of the cross which he developed three years later.Footnote 24
The revealed God and the hidden God
Luther's distinction between Deus revelatus and Deus absconditus anchored the believer's certainty of God's love and mercy in the creator's revelation of himself in Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, and in the Word of Scripture as it was delivered to his people in oral and sacramental forms. The hidden God is God acting in ways beyond the ability of the creature, certainly of the sinner, to grasp and command. The revealed God is the same God as the hidden and unexplainable God, but by dying and rising to atone for sinners he has revealed that his essence is mercy and steadfast lovingkindness. In these lectures Luther treated the concept of the hidden God only seldom in detail and seldom warned against speculation beyond biblical revelation. Instead, he emphasised again and again the importance of the believer's looking and listening alone to God's revelation of his will for humankind in Christ.
God created heaven and earth, Luther acknowledged in commenting on Psalm cxxi.2, but human beings are not to search for him in heaven:
Just as after God revealed himself in Christ, the human being, we properly say and believe that all those who do not grasp this human being born of Mary simply cannot grasp God. Even if they say that they believe in God, the creator of heaven and earth, they nevertheless in fact believe in an idol fashioned by their own hearts, because apart from Christ there is no true God … Christ is the throne of grace [Hebrews iv.16], in whom all things are found, and apart from him nothing can be found.Footnote 25
Luther elaborated on the believer's dependence on God's revelation in Christ as he treated Psalm cxxx. The prophets knew the true God, who, even though his nature was infinite, had enclosed himself in his temple, his place of propitiation, and had bound himself to his Word. The Psalmist could pray to the creator, but he found true and certain knowledge of the true God where he dwelt on earth, in Zion, in his Word, his promises: ‘Today we ought not think about God or speak of him apart from our true place of propitiation, Christ. For Christ said, “Who sees me sees my Father”, and “No one comes to the Father apart from me”’ (John xiv.9, 6).Footnote 26 For ‘apart from Christ you have shut your eyes and ears, and you cannot say that you know God in any way unless he was in the womb of Mary and sucked her breasts. Where this God, Jesus Christ, is, there is all there is of God, all there is of the divinity. There the Father and the Holy Spirit are to be found. Apart from Christ God can never ever be found’.Footnote 27 For in Christ those who have been brought into communion with Christ's merits through baptism, in spite of their daily experience of sinning, trust the propitiation of Christ, and therefore know that there is no other God than the God who dispenses favour and mercy. Believing in Christ means knowing that God can do nothing else than love and show mercy. Therefore, Luther urged, believers must rely on the Word, not on their own senses. They must rely on the blood of Christ, which forgives their sin, in the face of the devil's hatred and fury of the world.Footnote 28
The atonement of sinners itself illustrates the modus operandi Dei. Luther regarded the atonement and justification of the sinner as the heart of God's message for a sinful world. The Psalmist's words, ‘If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, Lord, who could stand? But there is forgiveness with you that you may be feared’ (Psalm cxxx.3–4), set forth ‘the summary of all Christian teaching, the sun that enlightens the church. If this teaching stands, the church stands, and if it collapses, the church also collapses’.Footnote 29 In professing the God who redeems Israel from all its iniquities (Psalm cxxx.8), Luther asserted that this God has to be the God of believers, for even if faith is weak and under attack from the devil, trust creates hope in the God who liberates from iniquities through his Word. The very nature of God is reflected in his ‘officium’ of abolishing sins and creating life, righteousness, joy and all good. God effects the victory over Satan, sin, and death through Christ.Footnote 30 Luther did not view the work of Christ apart from his concept of propitiation and the seat of atonement of Romans iii.25. To adore God apart from the seat of atonement of Christ's merits and suffering is idolatry and sin, he told students in commenting on Psalm cxxxii.8.Footnote 31
God also lets his people know of him through his proclaimed and written Word. In this regard, too, Luther's central focus on God's Word in Scripture and in the preaching of the Church had not changed since 1518: ‘The Word is the most generic kind of all good things since it preserves all things. If it is lost or taken away, every good thing is lost at the same time.’Footnote 32 Commenting on Psalm cxxii.1, ‘I was glad when they said to me, “Let us go into the house of the Lord,”’ he reiterated that God's Word effects his will and accomplishes and supports all that happens in the world:
The Word alone preserves the joyful conscience, the grace of God and all religion (for all religion flows out of the Word as out of a fountain). It preserves the entire world. The world could not remain standing for a single moment without the Word and Christ. Even if there are many great gifts of God in the world, granted for human use, nevertheless the Word is a unique gift, through which all others are put to use and preserved. This Word declares that God is merciful, and promises remission of sins and life eternal.Footnote 33
Indeed, Luther could equate God's presence with his Word.Footnote 34
The life of faith means that Christians lay aside speculation and imagination in order to listen to God speaking. Luther interpreted ‘looking to the Lord our God’ in Psalm cxxiii.2 as a reference to the believer's need to be hearing and receiving God's Word: ‘This God is “our God”, who reveals himself to us in his Word and promises that he wants to be our God, etc.’Footnote 35 Believers remain in the Word and make judgements according to the Word, not according to the senses. Indeed they see nothing other than life in death itself, and nothing other than the brightest light in darkness itself. For just as God made all things from nothing and light out of darkness, so his Word makes it that there is nothing but life in death. Therefore, those who adhere to the Word of the promising God and follow it experience what David said, ‘God spoke and they were made, he commanded and they were created.’ (Psalm xxxiii.9).Footnote 36
Luther defined God as a speaking creator and the human creature as one created in God's image for community and conversation with the Creator. God's speaking elicits human response, above all the response of trust or faith in his person and his Word. In these lectures, as in the Heidelberg disputation fifteen years earlier, the revelation given in that Word, whether defined as the incarnate Word of John i.14 or the Word in oral, written and sacramental forms, reveals God's love, particularly as he demonstrated it in Christ's atoning work on the cross, and it elicits human trust as the response to that self-sacrificing love.
Faith, not human reason, orients and shapes human life
Therefore, faith in the promise of God in Christ stands at the heart of the Christian's existence. This fundamental element of the theologia crucis of 1518 is also present in the lectures on the Psalms of ascent. As he explained ‘covenant’ and ‘testimonies’ in Psalm cxxxii.12, Luther reminded readers that ‘the covenant is the promise of mercy through Christ; the testimonies are the will of God revealed through all time by Moses and the prophets. Therefore, God requires faith, and thereafter obedience to his law’.Footnote 37 Faith means more than simply that trust that clings to Christ for the forgiveness of sins and life. Faith is also the more general trust in God's person and in what he tells his people in his revelation. In the midst of their struggles against Satan, therefore, believers must realise that the Word of God teaches those things ‘which do not enter the human heart’ since ‘reason is always being turned away from the truth and embracing whatever pleases it and seems to resemble the truth’.Footnote 38
Introducing Psalm cxxi, Luther reminded his students of the believer's dependence on God's Word, which is beyond the grasp of fallen human reason:
Because God's Word exceeds every human capacity, and what it promises seems absurd or impossible or simply unbelievable to human reason, it is necessary continually to encourage those who are beginning to believe so that they are aroused to fight against the flesh, which battles against faith and the Word, lest, burdened by the weight of the flesh, the spirit gives no thought to invisible things and is totally absorbed in things of the present, the visible things.Footnote 39
For it is the nature of faith that the human will, knowledge, and hopeful anticipation depend on the Word of God, ‘which reveals the invisible ways God helps’.Footnote 40
The professor continued in a similar vein with comments on Psalm cxxi.3:
This is the highest exercise of faith, concerning which David admonishes us in this passage, that we learn to fix our sights on the promise and the Word and to judge things with eyes lifted to that which is above, not focused on the present. We have experienced this theology as the ultimate wisdom, which can never be fully grasped or understood.Footnote 41
Amidst their sufferings God's people, such as David, Mary, the Apostles and the prophets, have trusted that the confession of the Gospel that led to death was simply the beginning of a better, eternal, life. They counted their shame and ignominy as inestimable glory in God's sight:
This is the judgment of faith, even if the flesh has a different opinion, but such judgments cannot be made on the basis of the feeling of the flesh. To what does the teaching of the Word and its exhortations and promises pertain? Therefore, evil must be converted into good, and where the flesh concludes that it is daily being trod under foot into the mud, there faith ought to speak according to the Word, and to orient itself to the Son of God and conform itself to Christ. For those things are to be believed that are invisible and not apprehensible by the senses, not to those that are visible and apprehensible by the senses.Footnote 42
Luther was employing the same terminology that he had used in Heidelberg fifteen years earlier to describe the daring and dependence of trusting God's revelation in Christ's cross.
God acts hidden under opposites
Faith's struggle with the invisible things of God led Luther to formulate an axiom intended to guide believers through the inexplicable experiences that arise out of the fundamental mystery of the existence of sin and evil, as well as that of the continuation of sin and evil in the lives of the baptised. God acts under the appearance of things contrary to his will and his way.
Dietrich expanded Luther's briefly noted observations on Psalm cxx.1 to acknowledge that God acts in a manner contrary to human expectations, even those of the faithful. When we pray in the Lord's Prayer for the hallowing of God's name, the coming of his kingdom, the completion of the will, we are not praying that things happen that suit us. God often acts in these matters in ways that do not seem good to us. He acts in ways that are truly good. Therefore, believers submit their wills to God's will, confident that God acts for their benefit.Footnote 43
The theologia crucis is Luther's version of a theodicy. He did not try to justify God through explanations but recognised that all explanations wither and collapse in the face of the reality of evil and the reality of the good and almighty God who revealed his essence on the cross. Just as he brought De servo arbitrio to a close in 1525 with an expression of this aspect of the theologia crucis – his confession that he could not demonstrate his own mastery of the problem through answers –Footnote 44 so in 1533 he led his students into the attitude of trust in the person of Christ and humility that stands at the heart of his way of practising theology:
Consider, first, why [the Psalmist] calls God righteous, and you will see that he does that because, when you consider such things and God's way of ruling the world, it is the kind of governance that according to the flesh [makes it appear] altogether as though God is unjust, for he favors the impious tyrants with great wealth, power, dignity, etc. He heaps praise and glory from the common people upon heretics. Reason sees this and cannot judge otherwise than: if this is God, he is unjust. For, first, reason concludes that if God exists, he can resist the impious and destroy them. That is what it means to be God; he is omnipotent. In addition, if God exists, he ought to know what is taking place in the world. For in God it never happens that he does not know something or is stupid. From this, what else follows than the conclusion that if God knows these unworthy things are going to happen and can prevent them, certainly he ought to want to do that. If we posit that he does not want to prevent evil when he knows what will happen and could prevent it, it follows that he is not good, but evil, not righteous, but unrighteous. The conclusion is this: if God has the power, wisdom, and goodness, if he is able to help, and knows how to help and wants to help, why do things happen in this world that result in the impious reaping the rewards of their impiety in power, riches, and honors? whereas on the contrary the pious are afflicted for their piety by the impious in various ways. This is, as we cited Diogenes above, like a living testimony against God … Because we conclude that omnipotence, wisdom, and goodness should be attributed to God, the devil argues against us and against God himself on the basis of the principles that we have established, for it is as if that which we attribute to God has been ripped from our hands, with the result that we stand defeated by the way things are governed in the present, believing that God is either nothing or that he is feeble and powerless.Footnote 45
Luther had considered the argument carefully, as he conceded in De servo arbitrio. In the published version of these lectures Luther's reply seems to hedge somewhat his simple refusal to forge an answer. Dietrich paraphrased Rörer's notes:
Against this scandal the Holy Spirit reminds us that when the word ‘righteous’ is attributed to God, [it means that] unrighteousness and impiety do not please him. Indeed, if he permits the impious to flourish for a while, nevertheless at the end ‘he cuts the cords of the wicked’ (Psalm cxxix.4), that is, he will destroy their power and themselves. He frees the pious, however, and rescues them according to the passage, ‘you are not a God who delights in wickedness’ (Psalm v.5). Therefore, we respond to this argument that has been taken up from common speech by the musicians: ‘at the end it becomes clear who was setting the tone.’ For Christians ought not make judgments on the basis of that which they sense in the present, but on the basis of what the Word promises about the future, that indeed the impious, when they have raged for a long time and afflicted the pious in various ways, they will perish, because God is just. In the end the fact that the righteous are oppressed takes nothing away from his righteousness.Footnote 46
According to Rörer, the professor's response was a bit less definitive. It recognised the struggle of the people of God in their weakness when God seems absent or unjust:
The impious flourish, the pious are trampled upon. That does not mean a thing. He is righteous, wise, he wills what is good for the righteous, he is a friend and father of the righteous. Psalm 5 [.5], ‘you are not a God who delights in wickedness.’ He is rather righteous, and the righteous are pleasing to him. Loving the righteous and hating the unrighteous, what does he do? Where they are afflicted for a time, where they are under attack, there will be an end [to that] because his righteousness will not permit the righteous to be oppressed and the unrighteous to exercise control in the end.Footnote 47
Luther also addressed the fundamental question of theodicy at the level of practical, day to day experience of human beings in a sinful world in his comments on Psalm cxxi.4: ‘Behold he who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.’ ‘These words are a lie from the viewpoint of the flesh.’ Believers are thrown into prison; they are attacked by Satan and the world. Christ himself was crucified, John the Baptist beheaded. ‘The flesh judges these to be contradictions so that you think that God has abandoned his watch.’ The words of the Psalm are instead ‘words of the Spirit and faith, not of the flesh and human senses’. However, against all the evidence cited by the flesh, Luther confessed that ‘faith embraces the Word and judges according to this Word’.Footnote 48 He turned to his language of 1518 regarding the invisible things of God when interpreting Psalm cxxv.3 to address the questions raised by the suffering of God's people under the ‘sceptre of the impious’. ‘It is true theological wisdom’, he reminded his students, to be able to trust beyond and behind appearances in the God whose promise in the first commandment, ‘I am your God’, remains true even in the midst of oppression. For what he has revealed in his Word is the source of eternal life.Footnote 49 In 1533 Luther confronted the same struggle in which he had been engaged in 1518 and 1525, a struggle with the incompatibility of the existence of evil with the goodness and omnipotence of God. Luther's solution was to cut through that which his reason could not master in order to cling to the person of his creator as he experienced God's coming to him in the Word that conveyed his love in Jesus Christ, the crucified and risen Lord of his life.
The Church and Christians are always under Satan's attack
God's way of bringing about his will under the appearance of opposites confronts the Christian in the midst of daily life. This is true at least in part because the mystery of the continuation of sin and evil in the lives of the baptised includes the continuing power of the devil and his wicked adherents, both inside and outside the Church. In formulating the ‘argumentum’ of Psalm cxx, Luther noted that the life of the Church takes place ‘under the cross and persecution from tyrants and false teachers’. Satan continually attacks the Church, either through heresy or through physical violence, since he is, according to Jesus, a liar and a murderer (John viii.44).Footnote 50 God and Satan wage their warfare with the weapons, respectively, of truth and lie or error. In this conflict ‘the Christian, baptized in the name of Christ, has the gift of the Spirit and the Word … [The Christian] has the Word, which is almighty – because it is the power of God – and has Christ himself. Therefore, Christians are invincible, even at the very time they are being conquered and are falling. For Christ's strength is being made perfect in their weakness’ (2 Cor. 12:9).Footnote 51
The professor used this passage, with its clear contrast between the world's concept of power and God's, from time to time in these lectures, for instance, in treating Psalm cxx to illuminate believers' suffering. They suffer because Satan has to strive to play the victor – Luther used the Hebrew word ‘gibbor’ in the text along with the Latin translation, ‘triumphator’. But Paul reminds them that God's strength is made perfect in their weakness.Footnote 52 God's Word prevails in spite of the weakness of the people of God:Footnote 53 ‘Look at the miserable form of the Christian who is nevertheless redeemed. He is full of sin, sadness, death, indeed everything about himself displeases him.’ That is, however, conforming to the image of Christ.Footnote 54 The Church too grows under the cross: ‘The cross is the medium through which God wants to exercises us. He does not wish us to be overpowered, but he desires that daily we become more and more pure.’Footnote 55
Paraphrasing the reformer's formula for studying Scripture, ‘oratio, meditatio, tentatio’,Footnote 56 Dietrich had Luther say that
The church is in the midst of enemies, who attack its teaching with violence and with deceit. Therefore, it is said that in this danger I can do nothing better than these three things: First, I teach with full faith. Second, I pray with the greatest diligence. Third, I suffer. I teach so that the Word remains before the people. I pray so that the Word will be preserved and win the victory. In the meantime, however, until the victory is complete, I must bear whatever comes.Footnote 57
In the midst of persecution and other afflictions the Word of God accompanies believers, reminding them that the suffering is only for a little while and is not worthy of being compared with the glory that is to be revealed in us (Rom. viii.18). For God is faithful to his promises.Footnote 58 Not to trust in God's faithfulness when suffering under the cross amounts to abolishing Christ and God, regarding them as nothing.Footnote 59 Therefore, as he commented on Psalm cxxiii.2, ‘our eyes look to the Lord our God, till he have mercy upon us’, God's saints recognise that he comes to aid them on his own schedule. Because the saints sometimes feel as if they are hanging suspended between heaven and earth, they suffer tentationes, the spiritual afflictions of doubt and despair. They must grasp the prophet's consolation, that God will end such afflictions according to his own definition, at his own time, in his own way. The Psalmist presents an example of patience that commends to the saints ardent expectation of aid from God's hand that places all in his hand.Footnote 60
The struggle against Satan must be waged at the level of the deceiver's attempts to divert the believer's trust from the assurance of the Gospel. It is common to talk about distinguishing law and Gospel, Luther pointed out in commenting on Psalm cxxvi.2, but to put the distinction to use in such a way that believers experience laughter and joy is not so common. The proper differentiating of law and Gospel goes beyond talking, teaching and writing. The Gospel's voice of laughter and rejoicing routs the voice of terror and sadness. It must label Satan a liar and reject the conscience's efforts to prevent believers from forgetting their sins.Footnote 61
The battle against Satan and his lies is real and earnest, but at the same time God uses the cross of suffering and persecution for his own purposes. All such struggles are part of his way of calling Christians back to repentance. The cross reduces the flesh to nothing so that a person despairs of helping himself and throws himself upon God's help, waiting patiently and with hope.Footnote 62 Therefore, the sufferings and afflictions of believers, particularly their spiritual struggles, expose for public view the ongoing conflict between God and Satan. Thus, instead of being discouraging, they reveal that God is with the afflicted under the devil's attacks, and they provide occasion for trusting all the more strongly and steadfastly in the God who himself won victory over the evil one by going to the cross. In the face of the mystery of Satan's continuing ability to afflict believers with evil and lure them into sin, God continues to fight against evil in the manner in which he had won the critical victory in Christ's crucifixion and resurrection, through suffering and death which lead to the re-creation of new life in Christ.
For modern scholars ‘theologia crucis’ is a heuristic device that is designed to describe Luther's methodological breakthrough with the practice of theology that was taking place in the years after 1517. In the Heidelberg disputation Luther spoke of the theologian who has wrestled with the meaning of suffering and the ‘offence of the cross’ (1 Cor. i.23) as a ‘theologian of the cross’. In subsequent writings, he elaborated on the phrase with differing emphases. For him the phrase served to designate his way of thinking, his method of practising theology. It referred to elements of the content of his thought which guided the actual exposition of biblical texts and the application of those texts to people's lives. Although scholars today may formulate the precise dimensions of this hermeneutic in different ways, it is clear that it proceeds from the reformer's understanding of 1 Corinthians i and ii. That means that it is indeed a theology of the profession of Christ's cross and that it may be summarised in five fundamental axioms:
1. Believers are to distinguish the hidden God, who lies beyond the grasp of human comprehension, from the revealed God.
2. This God has disclosed his essence by giving himself for the sins of the world in Christ's sacrifice on the cross.
3. Believers are to rely on faith in God's Word over human reason.
4. Believers are to perceive how God acts in human lives by hiding himself under what seems to be contrary to his will and his love.
5. Believers are to be encouraged in the midst of their battle against Satan and every form of evil he uses as they live the life of daily dying and rising in repentance.
These axioms can be found in the reformer's expression of his theological agenda and method in 1518 and 1519. They remained the guidelines for his exposition of the Psalms of ascent in 1532 and 1533. The ‘theologia crucis’ served the reformer as a hermeneutic throughout his career.
